Spanish Catholic proselytisers in sixteenth-century Mexico faced many challenges in converting a native population bedevilled by deeply embedded pagan beliefs and customs. What could they make of the fact that the Aztec (Nahuatl) word for god, ‘teotl’, was so close to ‘deus’ and ‘dios’? How could the Spaniards preach against gruesome practices of torture in the name of religion when they themselves also believed that flagellated and burnt human flesh was pleasing to a higher power? And at times the Catholic religion actually presented a pallid substitute for Mesoamerican beliefs—take transubstantiation, for example. The transformation of a wafer and beverage into the body and blood of a god was a concept so challenging to European minds that it was one of the breaking points leading to the protestant schism.

But far from rejecting the idea that material objects could be infused with sacred power, the Aztecs had already developed it to a degree unprecedented in the Christian world. In fact, we who are raised in the post-Enlightenment Western tradition of thought may never fully comprehend how the Aztecs experienced their animated world. Molly Bassett's excellent treatment of Aztec sacred power will help ease the dimness of our understanding. Deploying ethnohistory, ethnography, art history, linguistics and archaeology, she addresses three related concepts essential to the Aztec belief system: teotl (god), teixíptla (localised embodiment of a god) and tlaquimilolli (sacred bundle).

Bassett plunges the reader into the living world of Nahua culture as it is practised today by Nahuatl speakers, ethnic Huastecs in Veracruz, Mexico. They can assess everything in their world as possessing (or lacking) animacy along a spectrum divided by two forms of the verb ‘to be’. The most animated things in the cosmos are deities and the sun, moon and stars, followed by fire and wind, mountain and water, the latter dyad representing the revered Mesoamerican concept of the local settlement. Less animated, on this spectrum, are Nahuatl speakers, followed by those who do not speak Nahuatl, who possess greater animacy than do wild and domestic animals. Finally, qualifying for the inanimate verb of being (but this is subject to differences of opinion) are plants and rocks.

This spectrum makes clear that the Nahua world was vivid with active agents whose presence required acknowledgment and negotiation. It also resonates with the European-based great chain of being, well known to the sixteenth-century encyclopaedist of Aztec life Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, as the organising principle of his great work, The general history of the things of New Spain (1950–1982 [1569]). Bassett discusses the deep European intellectual roots of Sahagún's work.

To demonstrate the importance of the spectrum of animism, Bassett describes a Huastec ceremony that she observed in which offerings—figures made of paper and reeds—were dressed, sanctified and ceremonially infused with living spirit. This prepares the reader to consider the well-known story that the Aztecs regarded Hernán Cortés as a god. Not quite. With the insights into the Nahua perspective that Bassett provides, we are able to consider her more nuanced explanation, that the Aztecs had to place Cortés within their existing categories by reading his costume, insignia and calendrical associations: “when Cortés accepted the [Aztec] gifts and (if he) wore them, Aztec witnesses could have identified him as a teixíptla, someone who assumed the identity of a god” (p. 43).

In turn, Bassett addresses the three essential concepts pertaining to sanctity. In each case, she thoroughly reviews existing scholarship and relevant ethnohistorical sources. Her insights about Nahuatl terms do much to clarify definitions and misconceptions. Nahuatl is an engineered language, its compound words lending themselves to metaphor and poetry. Both were highly regarded by the Aztecs, whose title for head of state, tlatoani, had the meaning of ‘chief speaker’—excellence in rhetoric and militarism were preconditions for political success in this world. While those of us not conversant in Nahuatl can console ourselves for possessing greater strength on the Huastec animacy spectrum than animals, plants and rocks, we miss a lot with so many terms borrowing meaning from each other. For example, Bassett explains how obsidian and ocelots are related through the quality of reflectiveness and how this further pertains to night vision, which in turn references divination, and so on. Bassett's command of these matters informs our knowledge of Aztec culture.

For any scholar who would better comprehend how the Aztecs saw their world, The fate of earthly things is a fundamental book. It is also recommended for those interested in the variety of religious experience—her tangential discussion of the Polynesian concept mana, for example, and its applicability to other cultures, will provide grounding for those drawn to the word's power to illuminate the topics of animacy and sanctity. This is just one example of how the book's solid scholarship goes well beyond the Aztecs and their Nahuatl language. Its clear organisation and writing style will render it readable to a wide audience, as well as valuable to Aztec specialists.